by Jane Ridley
Bertie’s household at the time of his marriage consisted largely of men who had served him before 1863. General Knollys headed the household as comptroller and treasurer. One of Bertie’s equerries, Major Teesdale, had been picked by Albert to attend him at White Lodge in 1858; another, Captain Charles Grey, had accompanied him as equerry on his trip to Italy. Bertie’s old tutor at Oxford, Herbert Fisher, became his private secretary.18 This was a household of which even Albert would have approved, and Bertie set about changing it as soon as he was settled in Marlborough House. By 1867, General Knollys was in a perpetual panic at his inability to control his royal master or persuade him to comply with the Queen’s commands. The Queen implored Bertie to gather around him “really good” people, as Albert had done, but he insisted on surrounding himself with cronies.19 His friend Arthur Ellis, whom he made equerry in 1867, belonged to the much-intermarried Ellis/Hardinge dynasty of courtiers, and Victoria raised no objection to his appointment. But she complained about the appointment as equerry of Captain Oliver Montagu, a younger son of the Earl of Sandwich and a “rollicking” officer in the Blues, whom Bertie called a “wicked boy.”20 Another friend of Bertie’s to whom the Queen objected was Charles Carrington. Bertie wished to make him an equerry, but Carrington declined the offer after consulting his father, who said: “You are his friend now, if you are a member of his household you will be his servant—he may get tired of you: and your position as equerry would not be a pleasant one.”21
Bertie’s masterstroke was the appointment of General Knollys’s son Francis as his private secretary in 1870. A dapper little man with shiny black hair and a beard cut into a strip down his chin, Francis Knollys resembled an Italian waiter. The Queen thought he was not fit for the post. “You ought to have a clever, able man, capable of being of use to you, and of giving you advice,” she told Bertie. Though “very good natured,” Francis Knollys was “not considered clever by anyone.”22 He was too deeply involved with Bertie’s circle for the Queen’s liking; worse, he was a Liberal in politics. Bertie mollified his mother by keeping on the seventy-three-year-old general, and pretending that Francis was merely sharing the work; the general, said Bertie, was “delighted” and felt that the thirty-three-year-old Francis was now “perfectly qualified” for the post.23 The appointment marked a decisive shift. All important correspondence at Marlborough House crossed the desk of Francis Knollys. Bertie had at last emancipated himself from Victoria’s court.
The rule of the Knollys family over Marlborough House was completed when Francis’s sister, Charlotte, became bedchamber woman to Alexandra in 1872. The Ellis family were almost as deeply entrenched: Arthur Ellis’s sister, Mary, who was married to Sir Arthur Hardinge, an equerry to Queen Victoria, was lady-in-waiting to Alexandra.
Smoking, which the Queen abhorred, was the badge of Bertie’s court. Bertie smoked constantly; photographs from this date invariably show him with a cigar or cigarette in hand. He tried to introduce smoking in the morning room at White’s Club, then the smartest club in London, and when the older members voted against it, the prince and his friends seceded in protest to found the Marlborough Club.†24 At 52 Pall Mall, just across the road from Marlborough House, the club was an annex to the Wales court. Bertie, who visited daily, and personally selected the four hundred members, commissioned Vanity Fair’s Carlo Pellegrini (“Ape”) to draw caricatures of the twenty-two founder members. The satirist Samuel Beeton sketched the club in verse in 1874:
A fragrant odour of the choicest weeds,
A hum of voices, pitched in high-born tones;
A score of fellows, some of our best breeds,
The Heir-apparent to the British throne25
Once Bertie offered Pellegrini a drink in the morning room, and the artist, emboldened by his success, replied, “Ring the bell.” “The Prince of Wales, without a word, rang the bell. To the servant who entered, he said, ‘Please show Mr. Pellegrini out,’ and never spoke to him again.”26 For all his affability, Bertie knew how to pull rank, perhaps the least attractive of royal characteristics. His informality was neatly encapsulated by a courtier who remarked: “Yes, His Royal Highness is always ready to forget his rank, as long as everyone else remembers it.”27
Several Rothschilds were among the original club members. They received the seal of royal approval in 1868, when Bertie went stag hunting at Mentmore. He traveled down on the train with Natty Rothschild, smoking all the way; at Mentmore he devoured a breakfast so enormous that it seemed “as if he did not mean to go out,” and then rode very well all day. Natty noted admiringly that the prince was “marvellously strong,” in spite of the fact that for the past week he had been “sitting up night after night smoking etc and has never had more than 4 hours’ sleep.”28 Natty was a Cambridge friend of Bertie, but even so, the immensely successful Jewish Rothschilds had had to struggle to gain admission to the top set. When Bertie was invited to a Rothschild ball in 1865, Lord Spencer, who was Groom of the Stole to the Prince of Wales, strongly advised him to refuse: The Rothschilds, he said, “are very worthy people but they essentially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out in the world.”29 The snobbish Spencer failed to see that the Rothschilds were valuable to Bertie precisely because of their wealth. Bertie—to do him justice—invited a number of Jews to join his inner circle, and recognized that their cosmopolitan networks abroad were indispensable when he traveled.30 Lacking the anti-Semitic prejudices of many Victorian Englishmen, he was more than happy to trade social recognition for Rothschild cash and company.
Bertie’s court fool was an elongated dandy named Christopher Sykes. Ten years Bertie’s senior, he was the bachelor second son of Sir Tatton Sykes, a boorish hunting squire who owned vast tracts of northeast England. Bertie first stayed with Sykes at Brantingham Thorpe, his house in Yorkshire, in 1869, and soon “the great Christopher,” as the prince called him, was to be spotted unfolding his giant frame in the inevitable house-party photographs, “the head always at the characteristic tilt, the clothes always a little more beautiful than the imagination would evoke.”31
At the Marlborough Club one night Bertie emptied a glass of brandy over his friend’s head. As the liquor trickled down his face and golden beard, Sykes moved not a muscle. There was an anxious silence, and then he gravely bowed and said: “As your Royal Highness pleases.” Sykes, who was a sycophantic snob, probably saw no humor in his performance. Bertie, like a child, couldn’t repeat the joke too often; every time Sykes dutifully obliged. And always the courtiers guffawed until their sides ached.32 Sykes had been beaten by his brutish father as a boy, and he was complicit in Bertie’s rituals of humiliation. But Bertie’s treatment of him was not simple bullying. The reason he tipped brandy over Sykes was that his friend was drunk. Most of the stories about Christopher Sykes revolve around his alcoholism, and drunkenness was the one vice Bertie abhorred.
Marlborough House was not just about such manly things as smoking and practical jokes. Alix made the new court the leader of fashion. Whatever she wore, other women rushed to follow. Her image was endlessly replicated in cartes de visite—the photographs pasted onto cards that started to appear in the 1860s. A study of photographs registered for copyright shows that royalty tops the list, and Alexandra was the most frequently photographed, with more images than either Bertie or Victoria.‡33
Madame Elise, the Regent Street dressmaker and one of the pioneers of haute couture, became royal warrant holder to the princess in 1867, and Alix’s patronage assured the house’s success.34 Alix had a dress allowance of £10,000, but she also had to contend with the disapproval of her mother-in-law. When Alix visited Paris, the Queen implored her not to spend too much on clothes. “There is … a very strong feeling in the country against the luxuriousness, extravagance and frivolity of society and everyone points to my simplicity,” wrote Victoria. Rather than vie with the fine London ladies, Alix should be “as different as possible by great simplicity
which is more elegant.”35 Bertie bought Alix only two frocks in Paris, “simple ones, as they make them far better here than in London, but if there is anything I dislike it is extravagance on outré dresses—at any rate in my wife,” he told Victoria.36 The Empress Eugénie wore crinolines and enormous dresses designed by Charles Frederick Worth that were heavily satirized in Punch, but by 1869 the imperial court was sinking into decadence, and Worth’s work was perhaps too strongly identified with the regime for Alix to buy his clothes.37 Not until 1878 did Alix visit the shop of the great couturier Worth.
Alix developed her own distinctive style—not cutting-edge, but always right for every occasion. Conscious of her beauty—how could she not be?—she thrived on the admiring glances she attracted in glittering ballrooms. She walked with a limp, carried an elegant cane, and perfected a technique on the dance floor known as the “Alexandra glide.” She learned to ride sidesaddle again, crooking her left leg rather than the customary right one, and keeping her stiff right leg straight—she thought it “[looked] ugly!!!”38 She concealed the scar on her neck with high collars of lace or velvet, and many-rowed collars of pearls.§
On an average of twenty-seven days a year in the late 1860s, Bertie cut ribbons, ate luncheons and dinners, adorned fetes, opened bazaars, planted trees, and laid foundation stones.39 His good works attracted little attention at the time, partly because charity was seen as belonging to the female sphere; it wasn’t real work of the sort Prince Albert had done; but, in fact, Bertie pioneered the role of “welfare monarch.”40 He took his role as president or patron of charities seriously, chairing meetings and speaking at dinners. As president of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, for instance, he made a point of visiting the victims of the Irish Fenians’ Clerkenwell bombing (13 December 1867), telling the Queen: “I am so glad now to have an excuse of going as often as I can.… A kind word or cheerful look, I think, helps and cheers them in their sufferings.”41
In 1868, he paid an official visit to Ireland. To appease the Irish nationalist Fenians, Prime Minister Disraeli proposed a royal visit, “as during two centuries, the Sovereign has only passed twenty-one days in Ireland.”42 Victoria agreed, though she grumbled to Bertie that the highlight of the visit was the Punchestown races, which would strengthen the belief, “already far too prevalent, that your chief object is amusement.”43
Everyone assumed that the prince would visit Ireland alone, but Alix had other ideas. Though almost six months pregnant, and still convalescent from her knee, she wrote an appeal to Victoria that was as emotional as it was unpunctuated: “I have a sort of very strong wish and feeling, if I may say so, to go with my Bertie this time to Ireland, and as three medical men don’t see any objection I feel I [would] much rather go (although I must say it won’t be very amusing for me) than be left behind in a state of fever about him the whole time which I don’t think can be very good for me now and as I really feel so well and my leg is so much stronger I feel I can as well go to balls etc there than here and as for the journey I don’t really much mind that.”44
This was an appeal the Queen could not resist; she always found it hard to refuse Alix. Thus began what The Times described as “the Danish conquest of Ireland.” Attended by Mrs. Stonor, her closest confidante among her ladies, the pregnant princess charmed the crowds, all the more because they knew (as the papers put it) that “she struggled against temporary indisposition and some influences of no slight weight in order to accompany her husband.”45 Alix the suffering, wronged princess personified the romance of monarchy in a way that Bertie never could—even in London, cheers for the princess were always given with “extraordinary vigour.” A hundred thousand people turned out at the Punchestown races to catch a sight of prince and princess. But the success of the Irish tour was, as Victoria cynically wrote, “of no real use.”46
Victoria fretted about Alix’s “miserable, puny” children. “I can’t tell you how these poor, frail, little fairies distress me,” she told Vicky.47 But when she suggested to Bertie that he and Alix should spend the summer with the children in the country, he was indignant. “It would doubtless be far pleasanter for us to live more in the country,” he replied tartly, “but as you know we have certain duties to fulfil here.… Your absence from London, renders it more necessary that we should do all we can.”48
Bertie urged Victoria to appear in public. He regretted her refusal to open Parliament. No doubt she disapproved of William Gladstone, the incoming prime minister, for introducing a bill disestablishing the Irish Church—as it happened, so did Bertie: but “I fear that the people do not know your reason, and will feel much disappointed and vexed to miss the pageant and the éclat which your opening Parlmt [sic] always gives.”49 Victoria protested that the noise of the London traffic gave her headaches, but Bertie insisted: “I feel sure that if you were to drive in the Parks and be seen occasionally there … the people would be overjoyed beyond measure. It is all very well for Alix and me to drive or ride in the Park—it has not the same effect as when you do it, and I say thank God! that such is the case, as we live in radical times, and [the] more the people see the Sovereign, the better it is for the people and the country.”50
Bertie had touched Victoria’s weak spot. Her stubborn refusal to appear after seven years of widowhood was increasingly criticized. In 1868 she published Leaves of Our Life in the Highlands, a collection of extracts from her Balmoral journal in Albert’s time, which was a surprise bestseller: The cheap edition sold eighty thousand copies within weeks, to the delight of the Queen, who thought she had discovered a way of reaching her people without appearing in public.51 But in May 1868 she was savaged in the press for neglecting her duty, leaving Windsor, and traveling six hundred miles to Balmoral just as the Conservative government seemed about to fall. The “cruel” press criticism caused her pain and shattered nerves, which, in turn, dictated rest in order to avoid a breakdown.52 No doubt the forty-nine-year-old Queen’s frequent headaches and swollen feet were signs, as Vicky wrote, that she was approaching “the most trying and unpleasant” stage in a woman’s life.53 The menopausal monarch was no slouch, as a glance at her voluminous correspondence reveals. Each day she spent many hours at her desk, often writing letters and in her journal until well after midnight. It has been estimated that she wrote 2,500 words every day of her adult life, penning a total of sixty million in the course of her reign.54 But her neurotic unwillingness to come out of widowly seclusion meant that she depended on Bertie to perform public duties, and he seemed strangely lacking in any sense of the limits on a prince’s behavior. Locked into a dysfunctional relationship that made them oblivious to the world outside the palace, mother and son drifted toward catastrophe.
A photograph of Bertie in June 1868 shows him jauntily dressed in a double-breasted coat edged with braid, and soft checked-tweed trousers. Not for the fashion-conscious prince the formal Victorian male uniform of frock coat and sober black. He wears a flower in his buttonhole and patent leather boots. He carries gloves, cane, and top hat: essential kit for the man about town paying calls.
While Alix awaited her confinement at Marlborough House, Bertie was at liberty to make calls on ladies as he pleased. The women of his household must sometimes have felt that he considered them to be his personal harem. Once he asked Alix’s lady-in-waiting Mary Hardinge if he might visit her in her private apartments:
Without coyness or embarrassment … [she] looked at him calmly and agreed, saying she would await him. Later, she went into her rooms, changed into her very grandest dress and put on her finest jewels as though she were to attend a great state occasion. In due course the Prince came to her apartment, knocked and she called for him to come in. He saw how magnificently she was dressed and was surprised and taken aback; for a moment or two he didn’t speak—and he then asked her if it was necessary to dress so splendidly for a private conversation? To which [she] replied “If your Royal Highness does me the honour of paying me a visit, I wear the clothes that are suitable for suc
h an occasion.” With that he bade her “goodnight” and departed—and she breathed a sigh of relief.55
One address that Bertie visited often that summer of 1868 was number 6, Chesham Place, off Belgrave Square. This was the house that Lady Mordaunt had taken for the season. Harriett Mordaunt was the twenty-year-old wife of Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Warwickshire MP. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, a well-connected Perthshire baronet, and two of her sisters—Helen, who married Sir Charles Forbes, and Georgie, the wife of the fabulously rich Lord Dudley—were friends of Bertie’s. Harriett had known Bertie since she was seventeen, when he asked her to stay at Sandringham, and an exchange of photographs and letters took place.
The eighteen or so letters that Bertie wrote to Harriett over the next few years are so innocuous that it is hard to believe that this was anything more than a social friendship. For example, he wrote on 7 May 1867:
My dear Lady Mordaunt,
Many thanks for your letter, and I am very sorry that I should have given you so much trouble looking for the ladies’ umbrella for me at Paris. I am very glad to hear that you enjoyed your stay there. I shall be going on Friday next and as the Princess is so much better, shall hope to remain a week there. If there is any commission I can do for you there it will give me the greatest pleasure to carry it out. I regret very much not to have been able to call upon you since your return, but hope to do so when I come back from Paris, and have an opportunity of making the acquaintance of your husband.56
Believe me yours very sincerely,
Albert Edward
A lady’s umbrella could perhaps be construed as a metaphor for male impotence, and Bertie’s letter could be read as a coded reference to Harriett’s husband, but Bertie could equally well have meant exactly what he said without intending any double meaning.57 There was gossip, nonetheless. When Harriett became engaged to Sir Charles Mordaunt, Lord Dudley took his future brother-in-law aside and warned him of the dangerous intimacy that Harriett’s parents had allowed to exist between her and the prince. And Harriett, who was a bubbly girl, prone to hysterics, sometimes behaved in a strange manner. Young men were startled (or charmed) to find her giving them passionate embraces. Soon after she was married, sharp-eyed servants started to keep diaries recording the behavior of Lady Mordaunt.
